Alright, then. A few weeks in and a few issues out, and the New Writing section is ticking along rather nicely. The chances are, if you’re reading this, that you’ve seen something nice over the previous weeks, and have returned in search of more. But it’s always possible, I suppose, that you’re merely staring aghast at the impertinence of a creative writing section in a newspaper! Isn’t a paper for solid, heavy, rounded facts, rather than the limp-wristed, overly-verbose and self-indulgent hand-wringing poetry inevitably represents?
Well, no. No no no. Not at all. A thousand times no. There are a multitude of reasons for including creative writing in a newspaper, and an equal number for the reading of that writing by yourself. Firstly, it seems to me that the main reason for the existence of a student newspaper is to fulfil the important task of discovering and passing-on information relevant to the lives of students: the scandals of the staff, the conniving of the landlords, the marching of the lefties – the things surrounding the existence of a student at Manchester University. And, I ask you, what else could poetry and prose possibly do but reflect that same vein of experience? In our section, a parable set outside Mars space-station has nonetheless been inspired by events outside Roscoe 4.14; a poem about a lonely fisherman has its roots in the rain over Oxford Road.
So a newspaper informs – so it asserts, suggests, provokes. How big is the leap, really, from the opinion page of this paper to the new writing page? Certainly, the arguments here are expressed with characters and line breaks and overmany adjectives, rather than rhetoric and exclamation marks – but certainly, arguments they are. And if a poem isn’t going to persuade you to vote UKIP, it might persuade you that your hands are incredibly beautiful, or that people are, at root, weird.
Look at the blind-date section. Want to read about love, or to laugh at misguided fools? What else do people write poetry for? Look at the crossword. Want to spend a while thinking about how different and unexpected words could fit together? Use that time reading a monologue, and use that ink writing one yourself.
So once you’ve discovered what students care about, what’s really affecting their lives, and what you should think about the world – why not turn back to the rest of the paper and see what the journalists and reviewers and fashionistas are bothering themselves with?
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